Top 5 Apps for Dining Out on iPhone

Best ways to eat out on iPhone

With disposable income scarcer than it’s been for decades, eating out is even more of a luxury than it used to be. When you do pop out for a bite to eat, then, it had better be good.

That’s where your wonderful iPhone comes in. There are loads of brilliant apps to help make the dining out experience that much better - from apps that recommend restaurants to those that let you book tables.

Read on, then, for our Top 5 apps for dining out on iPhone. Download these and your restaurant nightmares should be a thing of the past.

The popular local search tool Yelp is handy for any number of things, but it's especially helpful when it comes to finding restaurants. And we mean 'finding' in every sense. For one thing, it lets you know where the nearest restaurants are using GPS. For another, it provides user reviews on each of them. It'll also tell you which are the cheapest.

There are plenty of restaurant finder apps out there (some of them are on this list), but there's a sizeable minority of diners who aren't very well taken care of at all - vegetarians. VegOut focuses on identifying the best restaurants for both vegetarians and vegans, so you need never put up with dodgy nut loaf again.

So, you have a whole heap of restaurant recommendations - how about booking a table? OpenTable will take care of that for you, allowing North American users to make reservations without being kept on hold by a snooty waiter. You'll also receive reward points for using it. For UK users, there's sister app Toptable.

This app gives you a year's access to the highly regarded Zagat database of restaurant reviews. Its main USP is that it can be used offline, so it's the perfect tool for taking abroad when roaming charges can prove as prohibitive as the language barrier.

While most other restaurant recommendation apps focus on the best restaurants in your location, Foodspotting knows that often that's not specific enough. It focuses on where the best dishes in town are - the best steak, the best pizza, and so on - and gives you loads of lovely user-contributed photos to help you make your mind up.